Free Overdrive by William F. Buckley Jr. Page B

Property Taxes Are Borne by Residential Owners' I think you may find it worth your while to note that we 'rewarded' the Bank of Clearwater for giving us our finest buildings by piling a $335,000 land assessment increase on top of the $3,659,150 assessment on the new structure and we 'rewarded' the developers of Clearwater's finest shopping center by multiplying their land assessment from $960 an acre to $55,000 an acre, thereby piling a $2,720,000 land assessment on top of the $12,244,500 assessment for the new store buildings! . . . The President does not seem to realize that by far the biggest element in our overall inflation is the way land prices have soared far faster than any others to a total estimated at the census bureau at well over two trillion dollars, imposing twice as big a burden on our economy as the Federal debt." I agree, I agree. But I have discovered no way of interesting the general public in the subject.
    Most speeches, at least in my case, are prewritten. One can't write forty-eight different speeches in a year—and if one did, they wouldn't be very good. I learned in conversation with my son of the harrowing schedule maintained by the Vice-President. George Bush has accepted as many as eight or ten speaking engagements in a week, and half of these may call for major speeches—e.g., before the American Bar Association, or the American Enterprise Institute. Christopher has to set out, day after day, and come up with a fresh speech. A pity. It isn't as if the Vice-President's speeches were reported in the daily press in such detail as to preclude his giving them more than once. A not entirely explicable imperative is at work here, in sharp distinction from the well-known, and universally accepted, tradition of campaign speeches that are sometimes given, unchanged, eight times per day by the candidates; seven days per week; thirty days per month.
    My own feeling is that a prepared speech should be polished, to which end I tend to write mine out. For that reason the question period is useful, to demonstrate to the audience that you can also think extemporaneously. A useful combination—not applicable, obviously, to special occasions, of which there will be one the day after tomorrow, when what is said has to be prepared ad hoc .
    St. Petersburg is a substantial drive from the airport, and I am greeted by several old friends, but having arrived a little late I have missed the bloody mary and so, seated at lunch, I petition the waitress for a glass of wine, which she tells me is only available at the bar, a statement the residual meaning of which is that she is too busy to go to the bar, but obviously the guest isn't. At any rate, the wine is fetched up by a kindly volunteer, and I listen to George Roche speak with some excitement about the progress of his beloved Hillsdale, and the January launching of the institute at Shavano in Colorado. George's new director of development is John K. Andrews, Jr., whose name flickered briefly in the news in 1973 when he resigned his job as a presidential speechwriter with an unprovocative statement in which he nevertheless hinted at his discontent with regnant moral practices. John is highly literate, deeply religious, and a profoundly convinced conservative. He contracts to send me material on the forthcoming conference in Shavano for National Review . I am led to a press conference before the speech, where most of the questions have to do with David Stockman and his exchanges with the assistant managing editor of the Washington Post for the Atlantic Monthly; that and the huge size of the projected federal deficit. The local paper handled it all as follows:
St. Petersburg Beach—A . vintage William F. Buckley Jr. wowed business, educational and political leaders with an hour of biting political anecdotes and hard-line conservative economic philosophy here Tuesday. . . .
    The 55-year-old New Yorker tossed five-syllable invectives [animadversions?] and rhetorical